The Tongsa Penlop next morning came over to congratulate General Macdonald and myself; and we went over the jong together. Till I had got up there and looked down through the Tibetan loopholes on our insignificant Mission post below, I had not realized how certain the Tibetans must have felt that they could overwhelm us, and how impossible it must have seemed that we could ever turn the tables upon them. If one stood in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle and looked down from there upon a house and garden in the fields about Eton, held by some strangers who said they had come to make a treaty, one would get the best idea of what must have been in the Tibetans’ minds. They were in a lofty and seemingly impregnable fortress in the heart of their own country. We were a little dot in the plain below. The idea of making a treaty with us, if they did not want to, must have appeared ridiculous. And as I stood there in their position and looked down upon what had till just then been my own, I soon understood how it was that the Ta Lama and other delegates had been so casual in their behaviour.
Yet, in spite of our success, and to a certain extent by reason of it, I was still ready to negotiate with Tibetan delegates. I had disliked, with an intensity which only those can know who have been in a similar position, the idea of making any mention of negotiation during all that critical time in May, while they were firing proudly at us from the jong, and were surrounding me in my little post below. Now that, through General Macdonald’s skilful dispositions and the bravery of his troops, I was in the top place, I readily tried to negotiate. And I thought that His Majesty’s Government were anxious that further efforts to negotiate here should be made; for on June 25 they had telegraphed that if there was reasonable expectation of the early arrival of the Resident, accompanied by competent Tibetan negotiators, the advance to Lhasa might be postponed. They thought that the advance should not be undertaken unless there was adequate ground for doubting the competency of the Tibetan delegates or the earnestness of the Tibetan Government. Moreover, some few days’ delay was necessary for General Macdonald to complete his arrangements for the advance, to collect sufficient supplies, and to establish Gyantse as his secondary base.